Focus Debate On Drug Fight, Not Agencies

The Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen at Trinity Episcopal Church needs more room. Staff people have to do most of their counseling work in the parking lot.

They wanted to move to a threestory brick building at 22 Huntington St. A community group, the Asylum Hill Organizing Project, fought them all the way. The soup kitchen relented earlier this month, and is looking elsewhere.

Chrysalis Center, a facility that helps people recovering from mental illness, wants to move to a small office building at 36 Woodland St. Owners of condominiums next door are trying to stop them.

This isn't a not-in-my-backyard deal.

People opposing these projects feel that Asylum Hill already has more than enough social service agencies, and that any more will tip the neighborhood and make it a virtual social services mall, unappealing to middle-class working people.

"Certainly social services are needed," said Andre Buchanan, a resident. "But Asylum Hill isn't the only neighborhood in Hartford. A balance needs to be struck. The city and region need to share the burden."

The Hill, a neighborhood of about 12,000 people, has 40 to 50 nonprofits. Of these, perhaps a dozen or fewer are working social service agencies, group homes, halfway houses, walk-in centers, soup kitchens, shelters. It's a lot. I don't know if it's too many.

It's hard to see why AHOP made a stand on Huntington Street. The street, a testament to the failings of the pre-1968 building code, is jammed with ugly brick apartment buildings. Some are boarded up. Drug dealers work the street all day.

Loaves and Fishes wanted to use the building for both food and drug treatment. They were talking to Oxford House, a nationally known treatment program.

But the AHOP folks have a vision of Asylum Hill as the working-class neighborhood it once was, of residential streets such as Huntington remaining residential.

"That train left a long time ago," said Alyce Hild of Loaves and Fishes. Hild says that there are so many poor people, so much empty housing and so few jobs that Loaves and Fishes is only

helping. "We aren't breaking any possibilities for the neighborhood. Those possibilities don't exist right now."

Chrysalis Center is already in the Hill, on Marshall Street and Farmington Avenue, and wants to consolidate on Woodland Street.

Most urban activists would argue that poor people are in dire need of mental-health services. Such aid can be the difference between someone's working or being on welfare. But in the city, criminals sometimes prey on mentally ill people. On occasion, mentally ill people try to medicate themselves with liquor. Since they don't have a nice home to do it in, they became unsightly in the neighborhood.

People such as Jerry Russo, who owns six condos in Regency Towers next to 36 Woodland St., figure the Chrysalis Center would eventually lower his property values. Russo is a good guy, involved in many neighborhood activities. He'd agree that the mentally ill people don't like crime either. But if there's an increase in crime and drunks, property values probably would be affected.

It's possible that city planners can work with some of these agencies -- especially those who serve people from out of the neighborhood -- to use buildings on the fringe of the neighborhood -- Hawthorn Center, for example. But face it. The worst problem in the Hill remains drugs. If we don't do something about drugs, the rest of this stuff is playing checkers on the Titanic